


martyr

by maelidify



Category: The OA (TV)
Genre: Character Death, Dark fic, Dubious Consent, F/M, Not Canon Compliant, Smut, angst and smut and angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-17
Updated: 2019-09-17
Packaged: 2020-10-20 07:33:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20671622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maelidify/pseuds/maelidify
Summary: “The French,” he says after, pouring her a glass, “they call it the little death. Did you know that?”





	martyr

**Author's Note:**

> Personal request: Only read this if you're 18 or older due to the mature themes floating around here. Thanks!

_ “Eloa, they said, “Oh be _ _  
_ _ very careful: _ _  
_ _ an angel can fall: the most _ _  
_ _ beautiful of us all _ _  
_ _ is here no longer.” _ _  
_ _ -Eloa, _ or _ The Sister of the Angels, _Alfred de Vigny, tr. Alan D. Corre

* * *

The way water trickles, an inevitable thing. Thirst has been a constant in her life; even when water is filling her mouth, her lungs, her belly, it still is not enough.

  
“The French,” he says after, pouring her a glass, “they call it the little death. Did you know that?” A thin smile, his eyes crinkling and cold. “It’s funny, how they say that.”  
  
A sour feeling, like dread. She says nothing.

* * *

  
1.

Earlier, by a week, he dreamed of her and not for the first time. How could it be the first time? How could he have gone for all those years without being visited by her in his subconscious?  
  
He read once that we sent ourselves the dreams we want most. It is logical, then, that his dreams of Prairie contain more animosity than forgiveness. He knows how to be cold with himself, how to say, _ well, it must be what I deserve in her eyes. _ A kind of cauterization, to not allow himself the pain of pining. To keep it in a glass cage, so to speak.  
  
But in this dream, she is drowning. He rescues her, pushing air into her lungs with his mouth. The sky full of watching things and low blue clouds.  
  
She touches him tenderly, like she never would in real life. “I am made from the bloodiest part of a god,” she says. And he wakes up.

* * *

  
He had the dream again and again and now, drowning her after her rejection of his offer to leave with him, he thinks of it again.  
  
In the dream, he felt the panicked appreciation of life he used to have— a half-view, unable to see the larger picture, desperate to save someone. That’s why he cannot let his research subjects go, even though his conscience nags at him. The world wouldn’t understand that a life, one shadow among many, isn’t such a terrible thing to steal after all. There is always more life, more consciousness. Prairie is free in some several dimensions, if these theories are correct, and so is the boy she loves. That thought knocks against his ribcage, cold, and he allows the pain to bloom briefly before letting it go.  
  
Maybe she understands this. When she comes to, she looks frightened, but then she meets his gaze with hard eyes (so _ this _ is what it is to be looked at by her, to be seen), and says, “Let’s make a deal.”

* * *

  
2.

Without Khatun, the divinity that had been her shield had started to fade. Waking, the water falling from her, the OA feels dry, numb with fear. Hope is powerful, but without the fifth movement, hope is elusive, slippery.  
  
Hope has two faces, something inside of her says. She looks at Hap, who disgusts her, and feels something on the other side of hope, the dark reflection of whatever will help her escape.  
  
“Let’s make a deal,” she says as they move to the control room.  
  
His face is hopeful, a bit of light in its creases. She doesn’t want that for him.  
  
“But I won’t go with you,” she amends. “I won’t leave the others behind.”  
  
“No,” he says, shoulders dropping just a tad. His reactions are so _ normal _ , so much like a friendly man in a train station. “No, you won’t, will you.”  
  
“I’ll give you something else, if you’ll let them go.”  
  
His hard barrier is up again, as though she wasn’t always able to see through it, even before her sight returned. “What could you possibly offer me?” he says, finally. They are sitting across from one another in his little room; their knees are touching. Decisively, she reaches out, grabs him by the soft hair on his head, and pulls his face to her clavicle.  
  
She doesn’t say anything, but listens to his breath against her neck, the bright rush and halt of it. His lips brush her jaw before he pulls back. “I’m not a monster,” he says finally, words warm and desperate on her skin. Her hand is on his pulse, which has quickened. “I wouldn’t make you do… do that.”  
  
“You wouldn’t be making me,” she says. It’s odd, heady, to feel a body to close to hers, even his. “And you are a monster. You didn’t have to be one, but you’ve allowed it.”  
  
He stiffens, pulls back, and then closes his eyes, kissing her softly on the mouth. It feels frustrated, like a strangled cry, and she makes to lean into him. “Close your eyes too,” he says, almost gently.  
  
“So we can be blind together,” she observes.  
  
A huff of air against her lips. “Yes.”

* * *

  
4.

They sit at the table upstairs and he is nearly undone, facing her up here. After so many years, for her to be in his higher levels once more.  
  
“I can’t let them go and compromise my work,” he says at first. “I’ve thought about it, I’ll have you know. They’ll go to the police.”  
  
“They won’t risk it if I’m still your hostage,” she says. “And I would be, wouldn’t I?” Her gaze is level, factual. The way she’d just called him a monster, as though denying it would be an insult to them both. And she’s right; he cannot deny the pain he has put her through, the pain he will continue to put her through for as long as is necessary.  
  
“Yes,” he says, finally. “I’m sorry, Prairie, but yes.”  
  
“You’ll kill me if they go to the authorities,” she says. “Tell them that.” The words are thick, like she’s digging them out of her throat.  
  
“I don’t know if it would work,” he says. He looks at her carefully, searching. “And you won’t get to see him again.”  
  
The statement sits like a wriggling thing on the table. The pain washes over her face and he wonders, briefly, maybe not briefly, what it is to be loved by her, to be the absent figure for which she grieves.  
  
“I won’t,” she admits, “but he’ll be free.”  
  
Something about her, the way she allows herself to drown in feeling. He tries to categorize that; maybe that’s what allows her to come back so often. Maybe all of the subjects have the same emotional capacity. A common factor.  
  
Pity he’ll never find out.  
  
It’s disgusting, how intensely he wants her. He’s never been one to be ruled by physicality, but his connection with Prairie is more than sexual, more than intimacy or discovery. She’s his missing piece. She’s everything. It’s a sacrifice, but to unpeel her, to let her body in his and push his into her, is too great a temptation, in an intellectual sense and in every sense, to deny. He has worked hard, and she has offered, and he will not deny them this.  
  
Because there has to be a level upon which she sees it too. Their kiss in the lab was soft and resentful, both of them bitter, holding something behind the teeth, but it held something for the both of them, that much is clear. He wants to know what so badly that he could burst with the ache of it. Maybe she is knowledge itself; maybe that’s what draws him to her.  
  
“It’s your choice,” he points out. “Whatever happens will be your choice.”  
  
She laughs once at this, but then her face softens to something like pity, and then she is kissing him again, a harder kiss than the one in the lab, wetter. It is overwhelming, the feel of her, the smell. He pulls her onto his lap and she shudders, with revulsion or something else, who’s to say, and the muscles of her stomach are taut against his hand. She smells earthy, like rocks and stream and sweat, and removes his glasses almost gracefully, setting them on the table.  
  
He is overwhelmed, blessed with her weight, though a little let down. He wanted to be the one to bridge the gap, to guide her, to control the movements. The movements. “What about the movements?” he whispers into her mouth and she shakes her head, biting his lip softly. Alright, then. Something happened, something’s wrong…  
  
She shifts and it burns all the way through him, and the noise he makes is broken. His hand is buried in her hair, the soft wheat of it, and he is kissing her neck, drowning in the scent of her, in the bustle of heartbeat to tongue and teeth. When he pulls away, her skin is purple, marred by him.  
  
“You’re starting to see,” she says, lips glistening, hand raising to touch her neck lightly. “What you are.”  


* * *

  
5.  
  
“I am what I have to be,” he says, and she nods, not because she agrees with him, but because she knows he needs the justification.

  
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll be what I have to be, too.” She goes back to kissing him— and this is, of course, nothing like what kissing Homer would be like. This is ugly, and she embraces that, embraces him, the hard, heavy lines of muscles in his arms, the scent of aftershave, the curiously hateful person that he is. She knows she can make love to him, though. She knows any mind holds a cocoon and, maybe somewhere, unacknowledged, is the kind of connection no one asks for but that exists nonetheless.  
  
And, to be fair, she is touch-starved. Drinking his skin in is light and darkness. Feast and famine. Stubbornly, she refuses to pretend he is the man she loves-- but the angel hunter _ is _ significant to her, destructively significant. It is almost the only outcome of all this, of these past several years.  
  
Unthinking, she gasps as he thrusts up at her. Physical evidence of this, whatever this is, growing hard between them, and her own arousal pooling under her clothes.   
  
“We do this,” she says, and hisses when he thrusts again, “and you let them go. Promise me, Hap.”  
  
“Anything,” he says, gasping like something lost, and she even half believes him.  
  
But only half, because she _ knows _ he won’t do anything. His affection for her is irreparably tied to his assumed ownership of her. Her freedom can never be a condition, not unless he allows something transformative to take hold, not unless he becomes a different self.  
  
So she removes herself from his lap and backs against the counter, one hand curling back on the cutting board. The tactile memory of that first small freedom, and the days after it. The salt and pepper shakers still have braille on them.  
  
“Not anything, Hap,” she says again and he cranes his neck to look over at her. A breath, deep, through his nose and out the mouth. “I know you won’t do anything.”  
  
“Prairie,” he says, almost reprimanding, a frustrated smile lingering on the corners of his mouth. Then he stands, grimacing a little from his arousal, and steps over to her. His hand hovers between them before settling awkwardly on her waist, his forehead pressing to hers. It’s somewhat natural, domestic, the gesture. It’s the thing that lived in the spaces between them when she served as his housekeeper. It’s frightening too, his presence so close to hers, and the combination of comfort and discomfort is overwhelming, all-encompassing. “One,” he says, voice low. “I’ll let one go, before we… You pick.”  
  
She closes her eyes and his fingers run lightly over her eyelids, down her nose, tracing her mouth.  
  
“You pick, Prairie,” he says again.  
  
“Stop it,” she breathes, and shakes her head a little. “You know. You know who I’m going to pick.”  
  
She opens her eyes to find him studying her. He resents Homer, she knows it, and the feeling is etched into his brow, into the clouded look in his eyes.  
  
“I’ll give you so much more than the boy ever could,” he says, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. The simple touch makes her shiver.  
  
“No,” she says, simply.  
  
A noise of frustration. “We’ll… we’ll accomplish so much together.”  
  
“We’ll never accomplish anything,” she says, “until you’re willing to sacrifice as you’ve made us sacrifice.”  
  
“You’re saying I’ve never made sacrifices,” he says, not an accusation as much as an observation. His anger is always low-voiced, calm. “Prairie you don’t know, the credentials I’ve lost, the guilt…”  
  
“You have taken years of life away from us.”  
  
“You should know better than anyone that life is… is a well, that there’s so much more of it than we can ever know!” He’s frustrated now. No longer in her face, he is pacing, recently-retrieved glasses twirling in his fingers. “We’re so close to knowing!”  
  
“Maybe we don’t have to know,” she says. “Not at that price. Your compassion, our lives.”  
  
His fists tighten and release, and he turns his back to her. She wonders if this truth has lost him, if she should start with smaller truths, or not bother at all.  
  
“Wait here,” he says, after a moment, and enters the code to the basement.  
  
She watches, and a feeling like sorrow and knowing flits through her.

* * *

  
6.  
  
He doesn’t allow them to say goodbye. Not the way she probably would like, and maybe that’s a mistake, but it’ll hurt her less in the long run. Never having touched him, she won’t be able to say she knows what it’s like. She won’t be able to think about it while touching Hap later, and he won’t have to see her eyes disappear, her mind travel elsewhere.  
  
Homer is gassed when he guides him up the stairs, eyes glassy. Prairie looks at him, her eyes (blue like cornflowers, a foolish thought but a warm one, eyes like flowers) welling up at the sight. A smile blooms on her face, and a sob, a living shake, heaves her chest. Her vulnerability is beautiful, excruciatingly so, and he cannot understand it.  
  
“He knows the terms,” Hap says awkwardly, watching this. “I explained them to him. He… he didn’t want to go, not without you.” Maybe even that is more than he should tell her, enough to give her an edge of hope to cling to. Maybe. He wanted to tell her anyway, even though he can’t fathom why.  
  
She nods, but when she stands, he mutters, “move,” in Homer’s ear, and he does.

* * *

  
He should bring her back downstairs, but part of him is afraid the solidarity with his other subjects will change her mind, draw her away from him again. Instead, he removes his phone and locks her in his office while he drives Homer to the plane, eventually leaving him in Washington Square Park. It takes the better part of the day, and Prairie is restless when he gets back.  
  
“I need a shower,” she says, when he unlocks the door. Her eyes are swollen, but she looks happy, lighter. “And some food.”  
  
“Of course. Whatever you need.” He reaches out but doesn’t touch her shoulder, the grimy white of her shirt. Perhaps he should wash her clothes, or buy her new ones. She follows his gaze, his hovering fingertips. Just hours ago they were so close, nearly intimate, and now the space seems once again impenetrable. He wonders again if it is monstrous to accept her deal, if that’s the one ethical line he shouldn’t cross.  
  
As though reading his mind, Prairie reaches for him, kissing him close-mouthed. “Thank you,” she says.  
  
“Don’t,” he starts, “I’m not…”  
  
As he trails off she is disappearing down the hall, into the bathroom, and then the water is running, drowning out his fumbling words.

* * *

  
She emerges a half an hour later, hair twisted into a wet knot. She is wearing the same dirty clothes over clean skin, and the dampness clings to her body. Hap averts his eyes.  
  
“Uh, help yourself to anything. To eat, I mean.”  
  
She looks at him and nods, moving to the fridge.  
  
“You shouldn’t have thanked me,” he says after a beat. He knows it isn’t like him to acknowledge that; in a way, he almost feels he deserves more gratitude, for the research he is giving up. But in her eyes, she owes him nothing, and he is beginning to understand the immensity of that nothing. The emptiness in Homer’s face under the gas, under the light of afternoon. How pale his skin, and her skin, in front of him, damp hair pressed to her cheek, like something half-alive.  
  
“No,” she says, sticking a spoon into a jar of peanut butter. “Maybe not.”  
  
He watches her eat the peanut butter and an apple and a handful of berries, and when she finally kisses him again, it’s blackberries that he tastes.

* * *

  
7.

When she was younger, OA would be hesitant to accept anything from him without her fellow captives receiving the same. Now, it feels nearly impossible for anything to be the same as anything else, and when Hap comes back from freeing Homer, the hunger is its own living being. A reminder of life.  
  
The creamy bitterness of peanut butter; the sweet bite of fruit. Her stomach is still a pit when she finishes, but she is used to it, and she lets the berry juice stain his lips too. She presses the accountability of her own hunger into him, stepping forward suddenly and kissing him softly.  
  
This can be said for Hap: he does not initiate. The whole time she was eating, he was watching. He has always watched with a careful, heavy intensity. He has always studied her; she felt it even back in the Oyster Bar when she couldn’t see him, though she didn’t recognize it back then.  
  
When she presses her face to his he almost seems shocked again, that same guilt that froze his body when she pressed his mouth to her pulse in his lab.  
  
He steps back. “Are. You’re sure, aren’t you, Prairie?”  
  
She knows, she has been able to tell, how desperately he wants this. It colored his actions almost kindly when she was first captured, and then cruelly when he used Homer to steal Renata. She does his complexity the service of considering the question.  
  
“He’s free,” she says, even though it isn’t what he wants to hear, even though he tenses and darkness crosses his face like a shadow. “I can feel it, deep in my bones. Have you ever been so consumed by joy that you want to consume everything else?”  
  
“God,” he says, and steps forward again, that same gesture of forehead to forehead. “Yes. No. I don’t know.” His hands, tight in their grip, a reluctant but unavoidable kind of possessive.  
  
“I think I’ve always wanted to… consume you, maybe, Hap,” she continues, wondering, if she doesn’t dwell on the words, if she can accept her own need to say them. To tell him all this before it ends. “I wanted all the acceptance you could give me, when we first met. And then, I wanted to take all the good things, save them out so I could destroy the rest of you. It was too hard. I couldn’t do it.” She closes her eyes. “That doesn’t make sense, does it?”  
  
“I think it does,” he says quietly.  
  
“I’m learning, I think, that there are two sides to things,” she says, “and that you can give what isn’t deserved. I mean, not everyone can, but I can.” His body, so close to hers, the heat of it, the scent. She breathes against his cheek and tries to forget about what needs to be done.  
  
“Yes,” he says, grip tightening again, “you can. You can, Prairie…”  
  
Then he is kissing her neck, soft but bitter, like he wants to eat her alive. Like he is keeping himself in check. Funny, how he selectively controls the darkness. “I,” he starts, like he has more to say, but he sucks at her skin again instead, and then bites, softly.  
  
She doesn’t recognize the groan that rips itself from her chest. A wild animal, and those aren’t meant to be contained. His body is pressed against hers, crowding her against the counter, arms a vice grip and she returns it, slipping her hands under his shirt to scratch one nail down the soft skin of his back.  
  
“Let go,” she gasps. “I mean, stop controlling your desire. I give you permission.”  
  
A noise of something breaking in him, and his hand on her breast, thumbing her nipple, running between her legs. Pressing his thumb to her through her skirt, the material grows damp.  
  
“See,” she says, a gasp, pressing into him. “See.”

* * *

  
8.

He can’t lie and tell himself he didn’t think of this, and often, and achingly.  
  
Grabbing her by the arm, he spins them into his room. He doesn’t lock the door. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, it registers: he doesn’t lock the door.  
  
The ecstatic experience of her body breaks him, like it’s what he’s been trying to find all along. The way she sighs, like she knows she shouldn’t. The sigh crumples in her mouth. He presses her down on the bed, pressing his knee between her thighs and kissing down her neck, the soft salt of her breasts, even the dirty material of her shirt as he stretches the collar downwards. Too much material, too in the way. Too much Prairie, in the way of everything, so much more present than what he’s trying to accomplish. Unless she is the embodiment, unless she is, as he reasoned before, everything.  
  
Maybe it’s unsuccessful, but he tries to be gentle when he lifts her dress and shirt, leaving her in her underwear. He always imagined doing this gently; back when she was blind, she seemed fragile to him, something to be treated with great care.  
  
It was foolish, that line of thought, but a tender part of him still reaches for her, still wants to hold her bones gently, so gently.  
  
She glares up at him and he knows that isn’t what she wants. She doesn’t think it’s honest. Maybe, he reasons, it isn’t. She would accept gentleness from the boy, perhaps. Not from him.  
  
A self-deprecating smile twitches on his face, and he covers her mouth with his own, stroking her tongue with his. She bites down lightly on it and he presses her face up with his palm, holding the sharp lines of her jaw. Thumb to chin, her eyes open and glazed. He can almost pretend she is still blind, then.  
  
Pressing his knee into her harder, he kisses her cheek and places his mouth next to her ear. “Did you think about this, Prairie? Did you think about me?”  
  
A small whine, and then, “Sometimes. Sometimes…”  
  
Her underwear, pulled down. His fingers twisting in her curls, then finding that spot between labia. Her words send a streak of warmth through him, but she’s glaring again, always glaring…  
  
“You hated it,” he observes, stroking just above her clit, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in his chest. “You hated thinking about me.”  
  
“Yes,” she says, defiantly, and then she cries out as he moves his fingers, her pleasure a clear kind of pain. So. If he gets anything from her, it isn’t love: it is this murky, uncertain thing, something that can barely be studied, something too elusive to measure.  
  
Hap likes it anyway, even though he shouldn’t.  
  
“Don’t,” he says, and then kisses her ear. “Don’t hate it.”  
  
“If you’re going to be kind,” she says through gritted teeth, “commit to being kind.”  
  
He bites her ear. It’s frustrating, her focus on polarity. But her pleasure is evident as he pulls himself out of his pants, as he slides into her slowly, paying attention to every small gasp, the way she twists a little, the way her heels bring her body closer to his. She bites her lip, so quickly and softly that he nearly doesn’t notice.  
  
The motion is easy to get lost in; the perfect collision of her body and his, and her hands in his hair, now, and her knee brushing his mouth as he shifts them. The soft light hairs there. He moves faster now and it’s terrifying, the thought that this will end, that it will culminate and cast him back into peace, peace that he doesn’t want, that he’ll never want…  
  
He has sacrificed peace. Maybe this is what she has longed for him to admit, and maybe this is what he can finally grieve.  
  
He comes out of it with customary heaviness, but she’s still writhing beneath him. Breathing on her jaw, he rubs her clit again, and again, bringing her closer. Then, running his finger down her throat, kissing her pulse, she finally succumbs, lips falling open, teeth shining and wild.  
  
Her orgasm is oddly quiet, a storm on her face, and he leaves his hand on her throat for a while afterwards, noting with an odd softness the knock of her pulse to his skin, like something he is irreparably containing.

* * *

  
9.

Afterwards, as the OA curls herself into a naked ball and stares at Hap, he mentions _ la petite mort _ . She stares at him in her silence, watching the play of light on his face, the deep pockets of shadow. She wants to touch him again, but keeps her arms curled around herself, and then glances at the pillow, still in its place, where it was earlier before he came back.  
  
“Anyway,” he says, when she doesn’t say anything, “what I’m saying is, sex and death are irrevocably linked.”  
  
He keeps a pitcher next to his bed and she sips the water he poured from it, appreciating the cleansing of it, the way it fills her body. Water, the inevitable thing, the trickle sometimes keeping her up at night.  
  
“We forgot protection,” she says, and her voice is scratchy.  
  
“Vasectomy. I should have mentioned.”  
  
She nods, sips again. “And the others?”  
  
“Don’t worry about them,” he says. His arms wrap around her; she lets her hand slip under the pillow before wrapping around him in turn, arms tense and exhausted.  
  
The experience has spent her, physically and emotionally. She used to hope a glimmer of good in him would lead to her freedom. Then she hoped that the evil in him would keep him in the dark long enough for her and the others to escape. Now everything is clouded, linked, unkindly gray. The way he hissed her name when he orgasmed, the way he gently kissed her hairline after she did.  
  
The way it all made sense, rushing towards this like a stream, the halves of their bodies together fuller and stranger than either had realized.  
  
“This is all more complicated than I ever thought possible,” she murmurs, and something comes alive in his face when she says that. She allows them a kiss, brief and soft and full of her own honesty, before plunging the pocket knife into his kidney.  
  
While he’d been gone, she found it in his drawer and stashed it under the pillow, a sharp thing hidden behind their lovemaking. He must have forgotten he had it in there. Years ago, when she tried to kill him, she hadn’t been strong enough. She still isn’t strong enough, and her eyes well with tears as he gasps, as her fingertips grow warm with blood.  
  
She stabs him again.  
  
“Prairie,” he says, voice a croak, and god. She sees it now. She sees _ him _ . His hair is soft when she strokes it, tainting the strands crimson.  
  
“We could have…” he says, chest heaving in starts and stops. “And the others…”  
  
“I watched you put the code in,” she says.  
  
“Clumsy of me,” he says. His eyes close, and open again, staring at her, desperate, in awe, terrified. “Or not. Maybe…”  
  
“I’m doing this for you,” she says. “For what you’ll discover. And… And I need to be free.”  
  
She presses her forehead to his, the only time she has initiated the intimate gesture. This is her martyrdom; this is the softness in herself she is cutting with bloody fingers.  
  
He says nothing, still breathing in shaky rasps. The blood soaks the sheets.  
  
“There was an angel once,” she says, remembering an old poem, “who fell in love with Lucifer. She… was born from God’s tears of grief, but I think she was born from the blood, the death, the sacrifice. I think I’m only half.” She is crying now, the tears wetting his face, falling into his eyes as he blinks in bewilderment. “But I’m not. I’m only half of who I could be, and I have to cut off my legs in order to run.”  
  
“From the bloodiest part," he says, softly, and then he coughs. Gasps. “Martyr,” he finishes, so low she can barely hear it.   
  
She nods, because she knew, somehow, he’d understand. Martyring the softness in herself. Who would understand it more?  
  
“Bring me back,” he rasps, and lifts his hand, as though to touch her face. His chin is lifted, neck exposed, accepting. “After. The second...”  
  
“I don’t know,” she says, choking on the words and the sudden grief, the ecstasy of it, “but I will see you again. Somewhere.”  
  
A third stab, and he is silent. Her hands shake and there is red on her legs, on her chest, on the soft pockets of her elbows. She stands, shaky, to find her clothes.  
  
He looks at the ceiling, and sees nothing. 


End file.
